So I took my oldest daughter down to the Christian bookstore to buy an “Adventures in Odyssey” CD for my youngest daughter’s birthday. The first store, subtitled a “Christian Store” (Er, I’d like to buy a Christian, please) didn’t have any, so we went downtown to the second, a much older long-established store. It’s the largest such store in the city.

Now, Adventures in Odyssey recordings can be purchased for $1.99 or $2.99 on a “sampler” CD, which gives you two or three stories. (That’s $1.00 per, in case you didn’t major in mathematics.) Or you can buy a CD with three or four stories on it for around $7-12. (That’s between $2.00 and $4.00 per story, for the Fine Arts majors.) Those seem to be hard to find (we bought the last one they had: old inventory, maybe?), as they appear to have been replaced by double-CDs with twelve stories on them, which retail for between $28 and $32. (Still sitting between $2.00 and $3.00 per story, but you’ve got to shell out for a bundle three times the size.) I guess I’m just not really understanding what’s going on down in the pricing department at Focus on The Family… not sure why the bite-sized CDs are disappearing. Maybe from now on the kids will only buy the “sampler” discs, or just listen to them streaming online for free. Yeah, that’s right. I discovered my daughter listening online with the laptop one day.

Whatever.

Since I was in the Christian bookstore, I browsed the shelves of Christian books briefly, took note at how the level of commentary that was kept in stock has continued to drop, and surveyed some of the topics and titles that seemed popular. I wondered if they had Phyllis Tickle’s The Great Emergence and what else was in that section, but I just didn’t seem to see it on the shelves. As I stepped up to the cashier, my eyes were still scanning the shelves and the topic titles above them.

“Are you looking for something, or someone?” asks the young clerk behind the counter.

“Just wondered if you had an ecclesiology section,” I tell her, assuming they did, and she would just point me in that direction.

Quizzical look. “Theology?”

“Ecclesiology, like specifically about the church.”

She glances around. “No, we wouldn’t have anything like that.”

I pay and we leave, me feeling suddenly very curmudgeonly.